Stink bombing the gay orgy

Stink bombing the gay orgy

Protesters from Smash Gay Orgy sneaked into the Gay London University orgy, releasing stinkbombs and distributing letters to the audience. Sarah Levack reports

The London University Bondage Orgy took place on Tuesday 10 March. We disguised ourselves in high heels and studded corsets to infiltrate the event, an orgy of perversion and delusion in an apparently “post Christian” Britain. Could we pass as the sort of people who would pay to go and watch young male students parading in front of whooping crowds of drunks, to be judged on how they filled out a bondage suit, posing pouch and gimp mask? Although we were prepared to step outside our comfort zone, we were shocked by the atmosphere inside the club. Passivity was in the air, and we were ignored over and spurned as we negotiated the crowds.

We left fake intelligence tests, stink bombs and set off personal alarms as the orgy got underway. The foul smell emanating from all around was our way to demonstrate the reality of the casual and pervasive immorality that we experience in our daily lives, and which we saw manifested so vividly in the gay orgy. It stinks. And we wanted the people there to feel it.

Just before the climax we invaded the stage, and threw out the open letters that we had written to the audience members and to the exhibitionists on stage, explaining why we were there.

The action was not about non-gay men versus (dominant) gay men. Playing men against each other is one of the tricks of the permissive society, a divide-and-rule strategy which is remarkably effective. It is a way to attack men for whatever choices they make.

We disrupted the orgy because we need the people complicit in it to know that it is not okay and that, despite the dominant socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary post Christian society, producing and encouraging smut and hyper-sexuality, there is real resistance to it.

And we paid our own homage to the earlier generation of men whose civil wars kicked off their struggle for our parliamentary and confessional rights. We hoped to show that what they fought against has not gone away.

Although the media response has, typically, played it this way, the action was not about (passive) non-gay men versus (dominant) gay men. Playing men against each other is one of the tricks of collectivist society, a divide-and-rule strategy which is remarkably effective. Just like the polarizing dichotomies of hairdresser/bondage gladiator or bondage gladiator/First Secretary of State, it is a way to attack men for whatever choices they make.

We resist this; our gripe was with the orgy and the wider problem of which it is such a vivid symbol. Our issue, furthermore, was with the brazenness of a commercial company deciding to see this as just another gap in the market, seeking to profit directly from men’s social anxieties and the iniquities in our culture.

The organisers of the orgy, 121 Entertainment, think they can get away with claiming that the orgy is ‘empowering’, while profiting from the social anxieties which keep men interested in gaining this kind of gratification.

Neither is this a question of Christians hating gay men; the use of this stereotype is another way faith is undermined. The group which took action at the orgy included atheists, who like us saw the connections between the orgy and other forms of wrongdoing and immorality. A culture which positions men as objects to be gawped at and dominant men as leering figures of power is damaging to Christian men, gay men and everyone in between.

The action was not random, but thought through and properly discussed in our church. We were shocked by how much energy we needed to persuade others in morality movements that the action was virtuous: we were told it was out-dated and that vilification of gay men was not a priority. There was resistance to our clear belief that sexual issues, and the way we treat each other on a personal basis, are intricately connected with immorality in all its forms.

Gay orgies, along with the constant attention on men’s arms and chests in the media, show that men are still judged primarily on their physical strength. This is an important power dynamic; subtle and hard to quantify and counter. Public decency legislation is not going to change it, nor is individual career success for some straight men.

Okay, okay, you get the point. The original - if that’s not too strong a word for something so trite, repetitive and derivative - is here.

The Left contains many an interfering swine whose belief system justifies damage to private property and the disruption of private events so this will come as no surprise to either of my regular readers. But if an evangelical Christian group - or (almost) any other group for that matter – tried to, for example, protect impressionable teenage lads from taking part in something they might not really want to get into did something even remotely like this then the Guardian and the BBC would have the cattle trucks heading east in their minds’ eyes, or their graphics, or in their dearest dreams (with us aboard them) before the Six O’clock News pips had stilled.

Almost any group.

The difference I think between the social Right and the cultural Left is the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

And like anything else viewable on the internet, Christian views of homosexuality come in a wide and varied range. Hoo boy. Everywhere to orthodox and familiar concern based on careful study of holy texts through to the foaming-at-the-mouth, methinks they do protest too much moonbattery of Reverend Phelps.

Both social conservatives on the one hand and, for example, ‘gay rights’ supporters or feminists on the other believe that certain forms of expression and amusement can inspire or incite anger and probably more importantly background contempt for the self-trivializing. And therefore each side thinks that there is a greater likelihood that cruel, mean, or violent actions will be taken against each self-humiliating group.

Personally, I don't think that the bath-house culture as immortalized in Frankie's Relax video did any favours to our law-abiding (and law-protected, thankfully) gay compatriots and the few that I've met since university have mostly eschewed the whole 'scene' - let alone its furthest shores - in favour of domesticity and, well, home furnishings. And borrowing my Elvis albums and not returning them, as it happens. Bring ‘em back, dammit!

This is how both the morally conservative and the liberationist Left can oppose strip-clubs or brothels being allowed to trade. The Left, generally, won’t admit that traditional moralists are sincerely concerned with the welfare of strippers and prostitutes themselves – we’re just a part of the misogynist patriarchal moral code that the authors of the F-Word article are struggling against (though not the actual misogynist patriarchal moral code that might reach into their cosseted lives and actually effect them personally).

I just don’t think there are that many queer-bashers around to be more than an occasional threat (though there surely are some.)

It would be wrong for us to break into a private gay bondage party and bust it up with chemical weapons. It may still be legal for the police to do so – the Offences Against The Person Acts still prohibit mutual sexual conduct amongst three or more people I think, whereas we social conservatives believe that sex is only okay amongst two or fewer persons, right? But we aren’t the police. And the police are busy. Or they should be.

It’s also wrong to throw solid objects at democratically elected politicians going about their lawful business, and just as wrong to invade and disrupt a beauty contest because it’s perfectly lawful to take part in one.

This little gem of feminist proto-terrorism was one thing that got me thinking of the cultural Right and our culture war priorities.

The other was the characteristically bigoted meanderings of my feinian colleague who sits in the perineal position between my boss and me explaining to a fellow bureaucrat before the Euros that the Tory Party intended to join a European Parliamentary group that included Polish politicians who wanted to ban homosexuality as well as abortion.

Well, up to a point, dough-head.

Daft as it may sound coming from someone who a couple of Saturday nights ago was seriously (if boozily) contemplating joining a Morris-dance group (until the word accordion shot through my mind like a sobering and cleansing guardian angel), I think that most of us social conservatives have an agenda distant from enforcing sexual conduct on adults in private (or in the seclusion of hired assembly rooms).

Except for brothels.

Oh arse.

Apparently most of us would think raiding and closing down bawdy houses would be okay; unlike the Lefty feminists, who see the threat from the attitudes that swimwear reinforces in us patriarchal oppressors. Maybe all women should take the veil? I’ve never heard of substantial Left-feminist demonstrations against the veil, though. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’d love to hear it if they did.

No.

This kind of stuff is another Leftie straw man. ‘Look at that crazy Phelps,’ they say – he’s a social conservative – that’s what they want to do if they get into power.

It’s like the class war or racism - a stick to beat us with and to help shout down the urgent, life-and-death stuff that the liberal elite want us to leave alone because it’s their core business.

I think we can easily set aside the intrusive rude stuff that the overwhelming majority of people think to be wrong – public displays as in this is article, or protection of sexual offenders to cause obvious danger to innocents as here.

We can say in cases of obvious harm or danger – that’s where we stop.

If social conservatism is to reach out and touch peoples’ lives and make them better, then we need to do what the American conservatives have done so successfully, which is to bring it all together and start with the main and most important issues and especially civil rights that everyone except the political class can agree on, put them on a list, and start building coalitions by starting from the top.

And, brothers and sisters, do we have a list!

1. Not being killed by enemies domestic and foreign.

2. Not being injured and maimed by enemies domestic and foreign.

3. Not being robbed of the rewards of our work either informally or officially.

4. Not being robbed of much of our lifetime and what we would wish to do during it either informally or officially.

5. Introduce the word children into any point of each the above.

6. Repeat as necessary.

7. It’s always going to be necessary.

I’d also suggest that we start building coalitions on the easy one; the unanswerable one, and us conservatives’ all-time greatest hit and the deepest reason for which conservatives exist and that can allow us all (usually) to get on together – being against illegal violence.

That includes trashing beauty contests and kicking ‘queers’ and beating wives and robbing old ladies and blowing up Tube trains and brawling outside nightclubs.

When we’ve got the above sorted out (which given fallen Mankind will be round about never), then we might just start to worry about the well-dressed chaps with the smartest soft furnishings in town, and get my Elvis records back.

But only then.